Sunday, 14 October 2012

'She knows this life is hers to change'

‘Historians and
anthropologists have a common subject-matter, “otherness”; one field constructs
and studies “otherness” in space, the other in time.' - Bernard Cohn, 1980

The
narrator of Mischa Berlinski’s first novel, Fieldwork,
is a freelance, footloose traveller currently resident in Chiang Mai,
Thailand, with his girlfriend, Rachel; however, his is not the only story that
the novel tells, despite the first-person narrative voice. The narrator – whom
we later discover that Berlinski has named after himself – becomes increasingly
interested in the story of Martiya van de Leun, a one-time anthropologist who
has recently committed suicide in a Thai prison, where she was incarcerated for
decades for the murder of a Christian missionary, David Walker. But David has
his own story as well, as do the other members of the Walker clan. Even the
central narrative, Martiya’s, comes out in dribs and drabs from old friends,
lovers and acquaintances, all of whom give her different roles to play. Tim
Blair, an ex-boyfriend, begins his story by saying ‘You know she voted for Nixon, don’t you? Christ, man, that blew me
away,’ a detail that stands out precisely because he cannot fit it into his
idea of who Martiya was, while for Karen Leon, an anthropological colleague,
sees Martiya as part of the exhilarating experience of her first fieldwork, and
cannot believe her old friend could have killed someone.

So this
is a story about stories, but also a story about ‘fieldwork’, and the
possibilities and impossibilities of entering someone else’s world-view. For
much of the novel, Martiya feels that a huge gulf stretches between her and the
Dyalo, the invented people whom she is studying, who simply tell her ‘It is our custom’ when she asks any
question about their culture. The figure that haunts her is that of the
apocryphal ‘Eskimo Kathy’, a former anthropology student who deeply offended
the Eskimo community she did her fieldwork with, and disappeared from the
profession, but it seems with Martiya that it’s all or nothing; by the end, she
is so deeply integrated with the Dyalo that she cannot leave. Retaining a
professional distance seems impossible, as does understanding Dyalo beliefs
without coming to believe them. Perhaps, Berlinski seems to be implying, true
understanding is impossible without actual conversion; although Martiya’s
scholarly articles on life in a Thai women’s prison might suggest otherwise.

This
engrossing first novel is packed with life, voices, and fascinating questions,
and reads like a thriller while raising questions as profound as anything
tackled by Sebastian Faulks in his latest offering, A Possible Life. Far from being Faulks’ first novel, this is his
eighth, and the five linked novellas that make it up often seem to be labouring
under the weight of that earlier work. Like a ‘greatest hits’ album, we are
taken back to occupied WW2 France and incognito English (Charlotte Gray) in Part I, ‘A Different Man’, reflect on the evils
of finance and banking (A Week in
December) in Part III, ‘Everything Can Be Explained,’ explore primitive
nineteenth-century ideas about the mind (Human
Traces) in Part II, ‘The Second Sister’, and sophisticated neuroscientific
concepts of consciousness (Engelby) in
Part V, ‘You Next Time,’ as well as in Part III again. With these links rather
too obvious, I can’t say that this is Faulks’ best work, but there is still
some memorable writing here.

The
opening novella, ‘A Different Man,’ is simple but affecting in its depiction of
a very ordinary turning-point in in the life of a man who has experienced true
horror in a prisoner of war camp. ‘A Door into Heaven,’ with its captivating
opening line, ‘Jeanne was said to be the
most ignorant person in the Limousin village where she had lived most of her
life,’ is equally pared-down, but works through its depiction of Jeanne and
the reader’s engagement with her outwardly uneventual life. The only real
failure in this novel/collection of novels was, I felt, ‘The Second Sister,’
which uses a rather crude depiction of nineteenth-century mental illness to
make obvious points about the brain and our concept of identity. ‘Everything
Can Be Explained’, set a few decades into the future and dealing with the
career of a brilliant neuroscientist, Elena, also rather over-simplifies
Faulks’ ideas about the consciousness by basing them, somewhat implausibly, on
a single construct in the brain, although it’s an interesting and necessary
introduction to his standpoint for those who have not read Faulks before.

However,
‘You Next Time,’ the final story, is Faulks's triumph. Anya King is an
aspiring musician in the 1960s, and the narrator of the story, her friend and
lover, Jack, thinks she is little short of a genius. However, Anya’s rise to
fame comes fraught with emotional difficulties, and their time together is
limited. In one of Anya’s early songs, concerning a woman who hopes for
reincarnation to live the life with her lover she was not able to in the
present, the message is clear: ‘I will
die and rise/The shadow on your wall/My name will be the only one you call/Oh
my darling, you next time.’ Jack realises early on that Anya does not sing
songs that can be neatly bracketed into those that draw upon her personal
experience, versus those that are beyond her experience, and this realisation is not only
applicable to art, but to life. Our ability to emphasise with those around us
becomes, in this story, a sense of a Jungian idea of a universal consciousness
and a counterpoint to the bleak materialism of Elena’s neuroscience, where we
die with our brains and bodies. While not accepting the idea of an afterlife
or, indeed, bodily reincarnation, Jack is able to see something beyond the
individual brain. He thinks of himself as a small boy, how he no longer shares
any cells with that boy, and reflects upon his life as a whole: ‘the list of facts that make my life... They
could be mine, they might be yours. I’m an actor playing a part I’ve never
mastered.’ Anya sings about herself, but also about others; the walls
between individual lives seem to be coming down.

It's an apt note on which to end this book, which for all its faults I still found more exciting than much of the fiction I've read recently. And having finished it, I
found myself remembering Fieldwork, which
I read earlier, and reflecting on the similarity of the books’ themes – our efforts
to understand ‘the other’, and how such efforts can be both too hard, and too
easy, at the same time.

ABOUT ME

I'm a Stipendiary Lecturer in History at St Anne's College, Oxford, and am also currently writing a novel (or three) in my 'spare time'. I like books, decaf coffee and cocktails, particularly dry martinis.